Chris Harman, one of the greatest revolutionary Marxists of recent years, has died at the young age of 67. This is a tragic loss for the revolutionary left.

Harman was a revolutionary from his university days, and a leading member of the International Socialists (which became the Socialist Workers Party) in Britain by the age of 26.

His writings will remain both an inspiration and source of important knowledge and arguments for anyone wanting to understand the genuine Marxist tradition. The breadth of his research and writing was astonishing. However, he was always focused on questions the revolutionary left needed to clarify, or debates into which he thought we should intervene.

So in 1984, he wrote what was for many of us in the IS tradition, a seminal document on women’s liberation. It was a summary of conclusions drawn from several years of debate about women’s oppression and the relationship between fighting for women’s liberation and socialism. In it he took up the question of whether women have always been oppressed. Ever since he has followed debates in archaeology and anthropology. In 1994, in a special edition of the International Socialism Journal, he summarised Engels’s arguments about the origins of humanity, the rise of classes, the state and women’s oppression in light of the most recent knowledge and theories in these fields. And only a few months ago he drew the attention of readers of the ISJ, which he edited, to new archaeological discussions about an early classless society.

In 1989 he intervened in the debates among Marxists on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, another topic which led to further research and intervention, with articles about the rise of the capitalist nation state, followed by the developments of that state and its relationship to capital. He wrote widely about imperialism and produced a pivotal book on the creation of the East European Stalinist states after World War II. His Fire Last Time was likened at the time by one reviewer to Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution in its grasp of the Marxist historical method. It is a marvellous account of the radicalisation and struggles of the 1960s and 70s.

Only months before his untimely death, his latest analysis of the world economic system was published. This was a re-statement of his original Explaining the Crisis which is one of the best explanations and defence of Marx’s economic theory you will read. Zombie Capitalism, the latest book, builds on that explanation and explains the new crisis the world system has entered.

His research and interventions are summarised in his A People’s History of the World.

These works and more are some of the best sources for an understanding of the dreadful traditions of Stalinism; they spell out succinctly and clearly the genuine Marxist analysis of twentieth century capitalism and into the twenty-first.

Harman  never pursued ideas or historical knowledge simply for academic interest. He was always intervening to win people to a Marxist world view. I remember being in London when the Stalinist bloc was collapsing. He was editor of the SWP’s weekly paper, Socialist Worker, a demanding job, doing numerous talks at the Marxism conference, arguing with people from all corners of the world about what their organisations were doing. At the same time he was madly learning Russian in the hope he could go to Russia and intervene in the ideological turmoil there, which he did. The tragedy was the organisations of the IS tradition were too small to be a pole of attraction for the layer of intellectuals he and others debated. The nightmare of Stalinism left a shadow which obscures the genuine Marxist revolutionary traditions,and it  still hangs over the left world wide. To step out from under that shadow, to understand the liberating force of Marxism, there is no better writer from the last 4 decades to study.

Chris Harman will be sorely missed by the revolutionary movement as we live through one of the terrible crises of capitalism he so clearly explained. However, the work he has produced will stand us in good stead and remain as a lasting memorial to him as we face the task of building a revolutionary movement capable of ending the rule of capital once and for all – a project to which Harman gave every breath of energy he could muster for the whole of his adult life.

Instead of bringing refugees picked up by an Australian Customs ship to Australia, the Government has tried for four weeks to force them to get off in Indonesia.

They had tried to come to Australia by boat from Indonesia because they had been left to rot in appalling conditions there.

In Indonesia, the United Nations refugee organisation had already concluded that they were in fact refugees. Rally to send a message to the Government: whether they stay on the Customs ship or not, the refugees should be brought to Australia immediately.

But he is a great film maker and story teller, and this exposé of the sins of capitalism – of capitalism as a structure of sin almost literally at one stage in the film – is a clear indictment of the free market system in the US and the profit motive.

I cried when he showed the evictions of ordinary working people. 

I laughed when experts tried to explain what derivatives - wagers on wagers or bookies off-laying bets  - were.  Even worse was that I understood the explanations of these instruments of evil. It’s a long story but working in the Tax Office for 20 years does that to the soul…

I cheered when the occupying workers at Republic Windows and Doors won their entitlements. I dared to hope when they talked about running the factory themselves. They did not.

I felt elated when one family occupied their home and stopped the eviction process.

I sang and clapped when the show finished with a Tony Babino swing version of the International.

What’s not to like?

Well, a few quibbles. The ugly face of US imperialism gets little run in the film – the death of over 1 million Iraqis and countless Afghans, the imprisonment of Palestine… Nothing. 

And Moore has (or rather at the time of filming had) illusions in Obama, and before him Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Even then, FDR’s so called second Bill of Rights included economic rights like a job at a living wage, a home, a good education and free health care for all. These aren’t bad starting points for socialists of today to connect with working people.

 Moore attempts citizens’ arrests at various banks.  Needless to say he doesn’t get into their buildings.

And that’s a metaphor for the US today – the people aren’t allowed into their buildings. 

Moore weaves an intricate story about the criminals of Wall Street, the very people who benefit from and create this inequality. These bloodsuckers live off the poverty and exploitation of working Americans.

Moore uses humour like crime scene taping one bank to make the point that the bailout is a massive theft of the money of working people. There has been this massive wealth transfer to the rich and greedy of Wall Street so they can continue what one leaked Citigroup memo describes as the plutonomy, i.e a society where the very very rich rule the rest of us. And we let them.

Only when working people occupy their homes to successfully stop evictions, only when they follow Republic Windows and Doors and occupy their factories to save not just entitlements but jobs and begin producing goods to satisfy human need, can we say, as Moore puts it, that capitalism is an evil that needs to be eliminated.

Occupying the workplaces and producing goods to satisfy human need is the way to eliminate the evil Moore identified that is capitalism.

And it is this democracy, the real and living democracy of the working class running their workplace, which offers the only alternative to capitalism.

See and enjoy Capitalism: a love story.

This is what Wissam Mahmoud Fatall yelled in a Melbourne court recently about ‘terrorism’ charges bought against him. He’s right.

One million Iraqis have died as a consequence of the US led invasion.  The figures for Afghanistan are unknown but rank in the tens in not hundreds of thousands. 

The Russian invasion and ten year long occupation (with up to 100,000 troops at a time) killed over one million Afghans and forced 5 million out of the country into Pakistan and Iran. Another 2 million were internally displaced. 

NATO troops in Afghanistan at the moment total less than half the Russian number (although the US is increasing the number) but have been there for over eight years.

Taking into account the fact the resistance doesn’t have the same firepower as the US backed mujahideen in the days of the Russian occupation, it seems reasonable to conclude that the number of civilians we have killed is approaching 100,000.  Some conservative estimates put it at 30,000.

Certainly the Australian Defence Force has admitted Australian soldier have killed innocent civilians. 

But of course as long as we are following the ‘rules of engagement’ that is OK. 

And now we pay blood money to cover up our crimes and salve our consciences.  How much is an afghan kids’ life worth, Mr Rudd?

The left must be clear on this. A victory for the resistance in Afghanistan would be a step forward for humanity because it would be a defeat for US imperialism.

Our task must be to build a mass movement in Australia against this imperialist war and to force our Governments to withdraw our troops.

The defeat of Russian imperialism in Afghanistan was one of the important steps that led to the liberation of Russia and Eastern Europe from stalinism.

The defeat of US imperialism in Vietnam meant that the beast licked its wounds for ten years before invading a defenceless island called Grenada in a dry run for bigger battles.

The victory of the resistance in Afghanistan will force the US killing machine to retreat for a while from its global war of terror.

This is a good thing. Less people around the world will die or have their lives ruined as a consequence. More people will feel confident to resist US rule.

Those arrested in Melbourne supposedly have Somali connections. 

Somalia is a basket case because of US imperialism.

In 2006 the US used Ethiopia as its attack dog to overthrow the Islamic Government in Somalia, a government establishing peace across the country after 15 years of anarchy.

Now the US supports a puppet regime around one of the men it overthrew. He has become imperialism’s  puppet against the Islamist forces, forces which have major support in many areas of the country.

As the destruction of Somalia and the resistance it has provoked show, imperialism is the real machine of terror around the world.

With Somali men on trial in Melbourne, the media has run and will run wild stories and analysis about terrorists. These servants of capital ignore the real story.

When Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd and their predecessors George Bush and John Howard sit in the dock in The Hague charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity then we can say there is justice in the world.

Until that day there is no justice.

The real terrorists sit in Canberra and Washington.

The August 1 national day of protest for same-sex marriage was a resounding success.

During the course of the day 5,000 people marched in Melbourne, 1,500 in Sydney, and 500 in Brisbane. There were also rallies in Canberra, Hobart, Adelaide, Lismore, and elsewhere, far eclipsing previous years rallies for same-sex marriage rights in terms of numbers and energy.

Several factors meant there was particular heat to the issue this year. 2009 is the fifth year anniversary of the ban on same-sex marriage, which increased the moral impetus to come out and protest.

But an even greater reason was the sense of betrayal and unfairness from the Rudd Labor Government. Rudd amended 84 discriminatory laws against gay and lesbian people in 2008, and has paraded around as if this was equality. But at the ALP national conference which the rally was held to coincide with, Rudd and Labor refused to even debate the introduction of same-sex marriage rights, and instead have expected gay and lesbian people to be happy with a relationship registry.

Resoundingly, the gay and lesbian community have rejected any such idea that we can have equality before marriage, and this was expressed in the turn out and mood of the August 1 rallies.

In Melbourne Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young announced Labor’s back down, to a collective boo from the crowd. Many felt deeply let down by a government they had some hopes in, and have found to be just as bigoted and beholden to the powerful in society as the Liberal Party.

Everywhere the rallies were boisterous and loud. Adding to the emotion of the day were mass illegal weddings, in which approximately 200 same-sex couples were “illegally wed” across the country.

Protestors in Melbourne braved the bad weather and on the main were prepared to sit through a ninety minute program of speeches and entertainment before marching from Federation Square to the relationship registry on Spring Street.

Once the rally got marching, it was an impressive sight, with the start of the rally having to stop marching half-way up Collins street, as we were told that there were still hundreds of people in Federation square waiting to march out but who hadn’t been able to because the numbers were so many.

Right throughout the march there were groups chanting at the top of their lungs, borrowing some chants from the campaign for marriage rights in the US, including “gay, straight, Black or white, marriage is a civil right”.

As we were basking in the sight of thousands of people taking ownership over the streets of Melbourne, one member of the Equal Love team turned to me with joy and excitement and said: “it’s like something out of Milk“.

This mood was reflected by the diversity of the crowd. A number of families brought along their children. There were also elderly people, and a large number of young gay and lesbians and their friends who had not been to protests before.

Wielding home-made signs with slogans such as “I’m Gay, Get Over It’, many had come through Face book, or by seeing one of the posters the campaign has been putting up, or grabbing a leaflet in the city, and dragging along their social network of friends and families to attend the rally.

This meant that many of the people there, particularly those of high school and university age, had come from outside of the city, and had no connections to the mainstream gay and lesbian community groups.

Most of the mobilising work for the rallies was done by Socialist Alternative, the National Union of Students, and the broader Equal Love group.

If the community groups had really thrown their weight behind the demonstration, and not just lent their name to it, then this fantastic demonstration may have been even more of a success.

A key aim of the demonstration was to force a debate on the issue of same-sex marriage, an issue that was resoundingly achieved. All year voice after voice has been added to the calls for marriage equality, and the support just keeps getting bigger.

Rudd didn’t want to debate marriage as part of Labor’s stage managed national conference, and unfortunately, the left of the party were only too happy to oblige him.

By our actions on August 1 we forced Labor to acknowledge the issue, and we raised the murmurings of dissent that are rippling through society into a collective roar.

PROTEST   
PHOTOS: BRISBANE PROTEST
YOUTUBE VIDEO OF MELB DEMO

The enlightenment did not grow in a vacuum. As the burghers began the long process of becoming the bourgeoisie, part of the journey involved economic and political battles to overthrow feudalism. 

The battle often expressed itself in the thinking of the time – science against religion, religion against religion (or more accurately the religious against the religious) , nationalism over regionalism for example.

But new ideas – liberté, egalité and fraternité – also arose, reflecting the revolutionary nature of the bourgeois in its great historic battle against the landed class and the mysticism of religion.

Parallel and intertwined with this, science rose from medieval witchery in a desperate attempt to understand the physical world.  This too was, if not part of the bourgeois drive, a necessary adjunct for its success. 

But capitalism also needed to understand itself.  Great economists like Smith and Ricardo began to explore the nature of profit but pulled back from the terrible logic of their endeavors – that workers create the profit on which the system depends and survives. 

It was left to Marx to take English economics to this radical conclusion.

But as the bourgeoisie established its rule across the world, its role became reactionary, not revolutionary.

This meant that while scientifically the great thinkers could develop their theories and practices, they did so within the limits of profitability, not human need.

Socially and politically, as the bourgeoisie became reactionary, we saw develop bourgeois theories of economics and politics that reflected and reinforced the interests of capital in general and often certain blocs of capital in particular.

The process of capital production and reproduction cares nothing for the circumstances in which it makes profit.  This is how John Bellamy Foster put it in a Monthly Review article called Marx and the Global Environmental Rift:

In addressing these environmental issues Marx took over the concept of Stoffwechsel or metabolism from Liebig, describing the ecological contradiction between nature and capitalist society as “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism.”  Indeed, “capitalist production,” Marx explained, “only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”  This rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature could only be overcome, he argued, through the systematic “restoration” of the metabolism between humanity and nature “as a regulative law of social organization.”  But this required the rational regulation of the labor process (itself defined as the metabolic relation of human beings to nature) by the associated producers in line with the needs of future generations.  ”Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together,” Marx stated, “are not owners of the earth.  They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”

 And so the very organisational relationships of capitalism create the seeds of its own and humanity’s destruction.  At the same time it is potentially creating its own gravedigger – the working class.  The choice, as Rosa Luxemburg  put it, is socialism or barbarism.

Science is both the servant and saviour of capitalism – reinventing the exploitative process through new products and processes and helping to massively increase the productivity of working people for the benefit of capital and its accumulation.

This contradiction is captured in Einstein – a socialist whose ideas and work helped develop the epitome of capitalism, the atomic bomb.

And so it is today as the fossil fuel industry fights, like the Catholic Church in medieval times, to retain its pre-eminent position in society, aided an abetted by popinjay politicians, scientific scoundrels and the mendacious, malevolent, manipulative media, to defend the ancien regime.  

The capitalist state is both of and seemingly above this fray. 

While the state is the ‘executive committee’ of the bourgeoisie, if it becomes torn between major blocs of capital, paralysed by the short term needs of capital accumulation and the long term preservation of the system, and if it cannot escape these contradictions, then barbarism becomes a real possibility. 

Cap and trade systems around the world reflect the domination of the past over the future and, without a mass social movement for a new way of doing things and which puts humanity at its centre, mean we are moving closer to economic and environmental breakdown. 

To reclaim rationality for the benefit of all humanity and not destroy it in some human induced environmental and economic catastrophe, science must become the tool of those who can develop a democratic and planned society freed from the strictures of profit  -  ordinary working people.

The Labor Government’s police force in Queensland has charged Tegan with procuring an abortion. She could be jailed for  7 years.

Her 21 year old partner, Sergei Brennan, faces 14 years imprisonment for allegedly assisting her to procure an abortion. 

The clinic in Cairns licensed to prescribe abortifacients including RU486 is just down the road. 

Because of the Bligh Labor Government’s refusal to stop the criminal case against the 19 year old, a case which raises doubts about their own legal situation, the doctors at the clinic have stopped prescribing abortifacients. 

Labor Premier Anna Bligh, a supposedly pro-choice feminist, said at first that this was an importation matter.  Clearly it is not since the person who bought the RU486 into Australia has not been charged with anything.

Now Queensland Labor are saying it is a police matter and that the ALP won’t amend the antiquated criminal law to remove the Dickensian criminalized abortion provision being used against the young Cairns woman.

Presumably Bligh joined the ALP and became Premier to make a difference.  Yet she won’t even decriminalise abortion. 

Some difference she is making!  She is indeed the Blighborg.

Like Peter Garrett if the choice is between power or principle power wins every time in the ALP. 

What does it matter to Bligh that she is destroying a young women’s life?  After all her christian right deputy premier would approve of her new found anti-abortion stand, wouldn’t he?

This is not a police matter.  It is a political matter. 

In 1999 a report on women and the Criminal law recommended abortion in Queensland be decriminalised (as it now is in the ACT and Victoria.) The Labor Government of the time did nothing. The Labor Government of today will do nothing.

The immediate solution is obvious. 

Attorney General Cameron Dick could take over the prosecution from the Queensland police and no bill it.  This means he would effectively stop the prosecution.

The fact that he doesn’t shows that Labor in Queensland supports the continuing criminalisation of abortion.

 (For more on this see  Labor’s Anna Bligh attacks abortion rights.)

 But is is not only Queensland Labor that supports 19th century laws. 

Federally Rudd Labor is about to jail Ark Tribe, a building worker, for taking industrial action over safety issues and refusing to talk about it to the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

The ABCC is a return to the bad old days of the Tolpuddle Martyrs when unions were per se illegal combinations.

The argument is slightly more nuanced these days but effectively it is about labelling construction workers and their unions ‘thugs’ engaging in ‘illegal’ activity for just about everything they do, including the heinous crime of striking over safety. 

As the song says when they jail a man for striking it’s s rich man’s country still.

Since the ABBC began intimidating building workers deaths on site have gone up.

Rudd Labor is going to roll the ABCC in to a new body called Fair Work Australia in 2010.

As John pointed out on this site almost 8 months ago (Rudd’s Work Choices) changing the ABCC’s name does not change its nature – an anti-union body with powers more draconian than any police force.

Its aim is to smash those building unions which stand up for safety, wages and jobs and to send a message to all other unions – accept the rule of capital and wage slavery.

In South Australia Ark Tribe and other building workers took action over safety issues. The ABCC – Gillard’s gestapo - demanded that Ark attend a hearing to discuss what happened at  meeting about the issue.

He refused.  For that he now faces the prospect of 6 months in jail.

The recent ALP National Conference passed a weak motion about there being one law for all, but didn’t challenge the right of a Labor Government to jail workers for defending their safety at work.

The peak union body, the ACTU and, I suspect, the more militant building unions, have in effect abandoned Ark. 

They’ll pontificate, organise token demonstrations and shed crocodile tears but will not take industrial action against the ABCC. 

They are burying the memory of Clarrie O’Shea and all those who struck to free him from jail when he refused to pay industrial fines.

Innocent people face jail under Labor’s laws for actions that should not be crimes. Abortion and industrial action are not crimes; they are rights.

Labor now embodies the two souls of reaction – economic and social.

Mass campaigns for abortion rights and the right to strike could defeat the reactionaries. 

But 26 years of class collaboration and social quietude make that unlikely to occur. 

The idea of struggle been lost from our collective memory.

Tegan, Sergei and Ark should be getting ready for jail at the hands of Labor.

But Garrett is not alone as a figure identified with the Labor left who has completely sold out.

There’s Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, who started out as a left-wing activist in the 1980s but now proclaims his admiration for neoliberalism. Yes, he’s in the “hard left” faction of the ALP.

Jenny Macklin, also from the hard left, backed Voluntary Student Unionism as shadow Education Minister under Beazley and is now continuing the racist NT Intervention as Minister for Aboriginal Affairs.

Then there’s John Faulkner, Defence Minister responsible for prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, and Greg Combet, Minister for Defence Procurement in charge of buying more effective means of killing people – both in the left.

But the gold medal for betrayal has to go to Julia Gillard, the left minister who, as Deputy PM and Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, has the greatest leverage to push for a genuinely left-wing agenda.

Is there anything that she’s done that isn’t a sell-out? Gillard, the former union lawyer, was responsible for drafting Labor’s “Fair Work” laws which leave unionists with fewer rights than they had under Howard’s 1996 Workplace Relations Act.

Why are the lot of them so rotten?

The lurks and perks of office and outright careerism are certainly important explanations. Once they’ve sunk into the parliamentary leather and start to see a Cabinet post in the offing, the politician’s principles can easily be swallowed. Everything about parliament militates against it being used to up-end the status quo. Those who remain determined to work within it end up compromising whatever left-wing beliefs they might once have held.

There’s a reason for this. Parliament is not a means to challenge capitalism, it is a crucial component of capitalist rule. Working within the parliamentary system means accepting the logic of capitalism, whereby every basic human need is subordinated to the chase for profits and military conquest. When capitalism is in crisis there is less space for reforms in the system. And capitalism has never recovered from the deep world economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which means that every Labor government, state and federal, since that time has been responsible for administering bitter medicine.

The parliamentary road to reform is above all else a nationalist approach. Reformists want to capture the machinery of the state which is, by definition, a national state. Reformists therefore take responsibility for securing the state against threats to it from within (for example, general strikes or “terrorism”) or without (for example, war). And with nationalism goes the idea of “shared sacrifice” that is used to justify attacks on the working class.

A golden era?

But didn’t things use to be different? Many ALP members comfort themselves with the idea that while the current crop of left leaders are all duds, things were better in the old days. The party as a whole, and particularly its left, appeared to stand for something better.

Nostalgic ALP members might point to the decision to expel Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes who attempted to introduce conscription for the slaughter in Europe in 1916.

Or they might tell you of the career of the feistiest socialist in Labor’s ranks in the past 75 years – Eddie Ward, dubbed by his biographer “the firebrand of East Sydney”. Ward was member for East Sydney from 1931 to 1963 and joined Jack Lang in the revolt against Labor Prime Minister Jim Scullin’s austerity plans during the Great Depression. He famously shocked the establishment by refusing to wear formal attire for the Queen’s visit in 1952.

And then there was Jim Cairns, the “Lion of the Left” in Victoria. Cairns played an important role in mobilising for the Moratorium marches against the Vietnam War in 1970.

Certain factors explain these figures and these times. The ALP parliamentary caucus, and especially its left, responds not just to pressure from the capitalist class but also to that from the trade union officials and from the working class.

The ALP’s decision to expel Hughes cannot be understood without reference to mass working class discontent and a wave of strikes around wages and conditions during World War I. The context of Eddie Ward’s career was the immense bitterness in working class circles arising out of the Great Depression and the pressure on the ALP from the wave of strikes following the end of World War II. And Cairns both cohered but also reflected the enormous wave of revulsion towards the carnage in Vietnam.

But it’s also important to understand the limits of the ALP even at its best. The party doesn’t act just to reflect the pressure from radicalism and militancy but also to contain and co-opt it. Labor acted in 1916 to ensure that radical forces to the party’s left were not able to tap into the massive discontent that was building up. Had a section of the union officials broken with Labor and established a genuinely socialist party, the ALP would have been in big trouble. Hughes’s expulsion was necessary at least in part to prevent this. Cairns’s role in leading the big Moratorium marches gave the ALP a left-wing image when thousands of young people were beginning to look to revolutionary politics in the late 1960s and early 70s. The activities of Cairns, and indeed the Whitlam government itself in its first 12 months, drew many of these people into the ALP instead.

The ALP left today

The fact that the ALP, or at least a section of it, can shift to the left when under pressure from the working class and the unions helps explain why the left in the ALP is so appalling today. With strikes and trade union membership at their lowest level for a century, and with the various social movements weak or non-existent, the left in the ALP is under no pressure from the labour movement. The union leaders may grizzle about Labor’s WorkChoices-Lite legislation, but you’re as likely to hear paeans of praise for the Rudd government as you are criticisms from the vast majority of them.

There are other factors as well. The collapse of the Communist Party, which provided many in the ALP left with their intellectual and ideological framework, left them bereft of any political compass. The end of the Cold War meant that the traditional axis of political competition between left and right in the ALP was gone.

And the decline of the left is self-reinforcing. No-one with a drop of red blood is likely to be inspired to join the party after seeing Martin Ferguson or John Faulkner in action. ALP membership has been in decline for decades and shows no signs of recovery. Most of the branches are dormant, in disarray or torn apart by branch-stacking factional warlords. There is therefore no pressure on the parliamentary left from within the party itself.

And, finally, the Labor left has been implicated in carrying out right-wing policies in government at state and federal level for 25 years. This has compounded the effects of the declining level of class struggle in turning the left into just an alternative career pathway. The battle between left and right factions inside the ALP is now simply a contest for parliamentary placement, not political principle.

These factors all limit the potential for the Labor left to revive. Nonetheless such a revival cannot be ruled out in the event of a general political radicalisation in society. However, unless these left reformists move towards revolutionary politics they will suffer from the same limitations as the party as a whole: its fetishisation of the capitalist state and its submersion in the parliamentary apparatus. We only have to look at the careers of their illustrious predecessors to understand this.

In 1936, while in Opposition, Eddie Ward told parliament in a debate about compulsory military training: “I should not be prepared to take up arms against the workers of any country, whether they be Germans or of any other nationality. As a matter of fact, because I am not prepared to do that, I am not prepared to tell others to do so.” And when in 1942, with Labor in office, Curtin proposed to introduce conscription, Ward fought him in caucus. But when the majority of the Labor caucus voted in favour of it, Ward buckled in order to present a “united front” in parliament.

As for Jim Cairns, the experience of being in office shifted him to the right as well. In opposition he had been a committed leftist who spoke often of the inhumanity of capitalism. In 1975, however, as Treasurer and Deputy PM under Whitlam, it was Cairns who mounted the rostrum at the 1975 party conference to lecture delegates that with the onset of economic crisis the big business wolf had to be fed, and the flesh had to be flayed off the backs of the workers.

The fate of Ward and Cairns awaits all who try to achieve fundamental change through the ALP. We have to look for other means if we are to realise the dream of ridding the world of hunger, poverty and war.

This article, by Tom Bramble, first appeared in the August edition of Socialist Alternative.

As John Lister puts it in the UK weekly Socialist Worker in a discussion of his book Health Policy Reform: Driving the Wrong Way:

[The capitalist system] places the priority on profit rather than human health, perpetuates extremes of inequality between and within countries, and gives preference to the operation of market forces rather than planning and redistribution of wealth.

As Lister points out nearly 85 percent of the world’s population has just 11 percent of healthcare money spent on it.  Those people suffer 93 percent of the burden of the world’s diseases.

Lister’s conclusion is that neo-liberalism, not need, drives health care reform. Proposed reforms in Australia just prove the point

The National Health and Hospital Reform Commission has just presented its final report to Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. 

A Healthier Future For All Australians: The Final Report makes a number of recommendations which essentially continue the ongoing privatisation of healthcare in Australia and the increasing use of price signals to reduce demand.  

The recommendations suggest moving some responsibilities and funding to the Commonwealth Government from State Governments.

This may save some duplication costs but will do nothing to address public hospital waiting lists, beds disappearing and less GPs with more patients.

Here is how  Robert Wells in ‘Can COAG deliver on health? History suggests not’ in Crikey describes the main changes:

The key areas for reform include:

• A greater focus on prevention and primary care, including the Commonwealth assuming full funding for these services.
• Greater clarity of responsibilities between the levels of government in relation to health services generally and hospitals in particular.
• Specific measures in relation to chronic disease, mental health, aged care and indigenous health; and
• Getting action on eHealth-electronic patient records.

These aims appear admirable but market solutions like the ongoing private/public split and the proposal for a Medicare Select scheme to operate in competition with current private health schemes don’t address the issues of delivery on the ground.

Neither does shifting the funding from State to Commonwealth Governments as the Report recommends .

Using a market model to address Aboriginal health won’t close the 17 year gap in mortality rates.

Propping up health insurers, specialists and private hospitals in Australia won’t close this gap. 

The number of hospital beds is now 38 percent less than in 1981. A market model won’t bring back those beds. It will exacerbate further losses.

Indeed Rudd is already talking about doing more with less in health care.  That shows his true intent.

Less nurses, less beds, less doctors, less hospitals but more costs for patients- is that what he means by more with less?

 The problem is not the funding arrangements but the market model for health care.

And one word of warning about the push for preventative action – this might benefit select groups of capitalists and actually be more costly to society over time because of its inappropriate focus on profits.

 The Commission’s recommendations do nothing to address the two tier system – one gold plated system for the well off and one queue infested and costly system for the rest of us.

As John wrote in Health care for all: time for a national system:

…when it comes to health, the market is a failure and doesn’t need carrots and sticks. It needs abolishing.

Why should medical treatment depend on what’s in your wallet?

I have an alternative.  Abolish the private health insurance rebate.  Establish a National Health System which is funded through progressive taxation. Make all medical and hospital services free.  Put doctors on a wage.

Increase public spending on health services to ensure there are no waiting lists. Soak the rich till the pips squeak to pay for this.

You only have to look at the US to see that model is a failure. 50 million people there are without health coverage. This disgrace is in the richest country in the world.

Canada for example moved away from that model to  a medicare approach in the 80s and the results have been a significant improvement in health outcomes for the whole population and a decrease in health costs overall – much less than the US system.

Estimates are that the move to greater Commonwealth responsibility and funding will cost around $5 bn per year and that initial capital costs will be in the order of $7 billion over four years. 

In  addition the report recommends a Denticare free dental scheme for all which will cost $3.6 billion and be funded by increasing the Medicare levy by 0.75 per cent.  Already the Dental Association has claimed this will do nothing to address the delays for the 650,000 Australians waiting for public dental care.

So all up, if we take the Denticare scheme into account, the total cost will around $10 billion a year. This sounds a lot.

It is one third of the cost of the tax cuts to the rich Labor implemented from 1 July.

It is about one fifth of what Rudd has spent on the stimulus package. It is less than a third of what he proposes to spend on jet fighters.  

It is what the tax system gives to the holders of capital (overwhelmingly the ruling elite) in capital gains tax concessions.

A wealth tax and/or inheritance tax would easily raise this amount.  So too would increasing the company tax rate and marginal tax rates on those earning more than $120,000 (double the average wage.)

Why single out the rich for paying for health care for all?

It is true that we as individuals benefit from ‘free’ health care.  But we need to keep our ‘individuality’ in perspective.

We are wage slaves for capital. A healthy workforce is a more productive workforce.  And it is that extra benefit – the value we as fit and healthy workers create which the bosses then expropriate - that should be the basis for funding any increased health expenditure.

So the Rudd Government will try to get us to pay for their market based solutions.  Workers shouldn’t pay for health care under capitalism, and they definitely shouldn’t pay for a system that cannot work properly.

The last word belongs to John Lister. He says:

 Nowhere is there any evidence that market-style ­reforms can improve efficiency, cut costs, or do anything but compound existing inequalities in access to healthcare.

However, the dominance of neo-liberal ideology and the plentiful supply of servile academics means that these baseless policies have become the mainstream agenda of the “health policy reform industry”.

My conclusion is that health policy reformers are “driving the wrong way”, asking the wrong questions, and getting the wrong answers.

An alternative is possible — one which begins with the progressive concepts of cooperation, solidarity and planning, and aims to build inclusive, comprehensive and accountable systems based on the collective sharing of risk.

This is the good old socialist principle: “From each according to their ability — to each according to their needs.”

 Exactly. Let’s tax the rich to pay for universal health care as part of a move to a just and equitable society.

Everything will go up, except for wages.  The working class will pay for the crisis of capitalism.

Interest rates will rise, fuel prices will rise, food prices will rise, unemployment will rise.  All of it is disguised in spin about ‘the decade of nation building’ and attacks on extreme capitalism (whatever that is) and neoliberalism.

But Rudd is a neoliberal, or fiscal conservative as he calls it. 

His neoliberal economic strategy is simple; government spending increases during  recessions and is cut during recovery.

For that reason the next Budget is likely to be a shocker – to supposedly free up the market to boost the recovery. In other words workers are to pay for the crisis.

The premise is that recessions are temporary aberrations which Government spending can address and that the market is the best vehicle for economic development and satisfying human need. Neither are true.

Rudd appears not to understand the business cycle (an idea Marx developed and which most economists and politicians now accept.)

Because capitalism is undemocratic and unplanned investment pours into profitable areas and there is overproduction or over-stimulation.  This depresses profits and demand and  recession develops.

Over time the system can correct itself, but at great cost to working people.

But Marx went further. He understood another consequence of the way capitalism is organised, what he called the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  

Labour creates profit, not capital.  Yet competition forces capitalists to invest more and more in machinery and the like.  This means that profit rates decline unless other factors like the destruction of capital, or falls in employment and living standards, and increases in working hours and productivity occur. 

Profit rates for the last generation have been low in the productive areas of capital where value is produced.  This real economy is manufacturing, mines and the like.

Profits boomed in the casino of capitalism - the finance sector and stock exchange.

But that boom was unsustainable if it was not underpinned by booming profits in the productive sector.  And it wasn’t.

And isn’t.

The present ‘green shoots’ are the same.  They appear to be based on a boom in the casino sector, not productive capital.  Certainly confidence is returning to banking and the stock market. 

But without a return to profitability in the productive sections of society a gambling boom is unsustainable.

Stimulus packages don’t address or improve long term low profit rates. Driving down living standards and destroying capital can.

Rudd’s nation building is an attempt to build up infrastructure. 

After 11 years of neglect that might help at the margins.  But it does nothing per se to restore profit rates.

Having transport facilities to expedite exports won’t work if the demand for exports fall.

So Rudd falls back on rhetoric.  Evidently the problem is extreme capitalism.  It is unclear what this means. 

All capitalism is extreme – it is a form of slavery in which capitalists expropriate the value workers make.

If by extreme capitalism Rudd means unregulated profit making, then he condemns himself. 

It is ‘extreme’ capitalism that he perceives will step in to save the economy as the government reduces its ‘interference’ in the markets when the recovery, he hopes, strengthens. He is making space for the cowboys to ride again.

Rudd is going to hand back complete control to the casino capitalists and attack workers.  What a great strategy for further disaster.

Readers might also like to look at A W-shaped recession? and Unraveling capitalism: a return to Marx.